Sky Beats Microsoft in Battle For SkyDrive Name

Microsoft's just lost a little legal skirmish with BSkyB in the UK, which may result in its SkyDrive cloud storage thing being given a new name. Because Sky's sort of bagsied the whole "Sky" trademark thing already.

The lengthy ruling sees Sky complaining that it's been using the Sky name for years in the UK and has previously offered its own online storage service called Sky Store & Share, which has since been binned. The court agreed this is poor form by Microsoft, with the key issue being that the Sky brand is so well known it may confuse us poor, stupid old customers when we see the word Sky alongside something that's not based around selling us football and films.

SkyDrive was always too good a name for Microsoft, anyway. It should've stuck with its usual utilitarian approach to naming products and called it something like Microsoft Cloud Upload Everything Service 2013. [Bailii via Trusted Reviews]